Friday, December 27, 2013

DURING THE HOLIDAYS the online literary journal The Awl tweeted out the link to an essay they’d republished on 12/23/2013, “When Alan Met Ayn,” by Maria Bustillos. It was originally published 4/12/2011. TheAwl’s editors apparently believe the essay is one of the best things they’ve published, or they wouldn’t still be hyping it.

First, because it’s by Ms. Bustillos. Maria Bustillos is a fan of Tom Bissell’s book of essays, Magic Hours. When the book came out she gave it a glowing review, and applauded in particular his hatchet man essay on the Underground Literary Alliance. She appreciated a cheap shot Bissell took in the essay at me and an underground writer. (More about that in another post.)

Second, I noted obvious intellectual dishonesty in the Bustillos essay. I’m not an Objectivist—then again, one never knows—and I disagree with the Ayn Rand philosophy on several points. At the same time it’s obvious to me that the established literary community has long tried to marginalize Rand and her writings—her achievements—as if they weren’t after all part of American literary history. As if they should preferably be banned from it; in the same way that same establishment has banned mention of the ULA. (In Rand’s case, it’s tough to ignore massive sales figures.) The Bustillos rant against Rand strikes me as yet another attempt to conform and homogenize American literature, to pare from it unacceptable styles and ideas.

What struck me in the essay as most misleading:

Where do I begin? Probably with Bustillos’ most fraudulent claim, that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was an Objectivist. You’ll have to read the passages in her essay yourself to see if Bustillos means this tongue-in-cheek. Her reasoning seems to be that Stalin was an egotist; Ayn Rand lauded egotists; therefore Stalin subscribed to Rand’s philosophy. This is twisted logic, but I find it used often in mainstream essays. It’s like saying that because all Spartans are soldiers, all soldiers are Spartans. Such backward logic throws over the bounds of sense. It allows the commentator to say just about anything.

Her bringing Stalin into the conversation struck me, because it’s the same game that was played by Tom Bissell in his essay on the ULA. Characterize your opponent as the worst kind of historical person imaginable, using the flimsiest thread of sense to do so.

In Bissell’s case, he characterized the Do-It-Yourself working class writers of the ULA as Bolsheviks, though our philosophy was the polar opposite of what the Bolsheviks advocated and practiced. The comparison was made and gotten away with likely only because we were, in the main, working class.

The Rand/Stalin comparison Bustillos makes is more ludicrous. What Stalin was, indisputably, was a Marxist-Leninist. His commitment to the ideology was lifelong. His actions were justified by the ideology. As Bustillos indicates, Ayn Rand’s family was dispossessed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Bustillos passes over this lightly—yet it’s the best explanation available for the extremism of Rand’s own ideas. Her philosophy, in its every tenet or novelistic character, was a reaction to what she’d experienced.

Stalin and his buds eliminated not just the wealthy. Anarchists were among the first to be silenced. With studied Marxist-Leninist rigor, millions of Ukrainian Kulaks—modestly wealthy peasants—were wiped out. Through his entire life, following the proper ideological maxims, Stalin sacrificed his people again and again to the interest of the all-powerful state.

Stalin was no Ayn Rand-style individualist. He rose to power as a member of a collective. He operated through his career as member of a collective. Stalin did what he did, in his mind, for the good of the collective.

A case can be made that Stalin wasn’t even much of an egotist. Churchill’s memoirs and those of others; descriptions of Stalin at conferences like Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam; show him to be in personality modest and self-effacing. Rather quiet. A good observer and listener.

We know he lived a modest, even Spartan lifestyle; usually in a small apartment or office in the Kremlin. His technique was that of power behind the scenes. A puppetmaster pulling strings. (As he did during the show trials; unobserved except as the red tip of a cigar behind an enormous screen.) For a long part of his tenure he allowed others to be front man head of state. Sure, he created a cult of personality about himself. He did this first with his mentor Lenin. In his shrewdness Stalin saw that the Russian people needed a god. Unlike Hitler, Stalin was not the kind of megalomaniacal dictator who required the adulation of his people. Famously, Stalin hid from the Russian people.

Stalin’s career stands almost as the triumph of a non-egotist. In person he was the most quiet and humble of the early Bolsheviks—which is why they trusted him and gave him power. His ascension over the vastly more dynamic, charismatic, and egotistical Trotsky was a victory of the quintessential bureaucrat. Of the Machine.

The man known as Joseph Stalin was skilled at handling individualistic egotists, as he showed at Yalta with his skillful negotiations with two men who had two of the largest egos in history, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Was FDR an Objectivist?

By Bustillos’ definition, everyone short of Gandhi and Mother Theresa can be classified as an Objectivist. Given their fame, we may as well lump those two into the category as well.

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What of the rest of the Maria Bustillos essay?

Look at it closely and you’ll see it’s filled with distortions. The argument against Alan Greenspan, and the connection between Greenspan and Ayn Rand, is jerry-rigged.

Yes, Greenspan was a core follower of Rand’s. But when he took the Fed job, after Ayn Rand’s death, Alan Greenspan, in Objectivist eyes, joined the camp of the enemy. Objectivists are a species of libertarian. Like all libertarians, they seek the elimination of the Federal Reserve System. A tops-down all-controlling central bank is anathema to them. They see it as a Communistic triumph—not least because the establishment of a central bank is plank#5 of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. Are not Maria Bustillos and the Awl editors aware of this? This alone discredits the essay’s argument.

One can see why Greenspan took the job—aside from abandoning, as others have done (see George Saunders) many of his youthful beliefs. He might’ve thought that by being inside the Beast, he could moderate its effects. There’s no doubt that if Ayn Rand were alive she would’ve banished him from the Objectivist community—and done it with style. Any economic collapse taking place during his watch would’ve been Greenspan’s just desserts, in her eyes.

But the collapse didn’t take place during his tenure. A financial panic did occur, but not the one in 2008. The stock market collapsed in 1987. Greenspan—and the Reagan administration—quickly limited the damage, and in short time put the Machine back on its feet; operating smoothly. It’s kind of unfair, don’t you think?, for Greenspan, having successfully battled the contradictions and inefficiencies of his own time, to be blamed for the failures of a later date.

Another problem with Bustillos’ argument is that she confuses monetary and fiscal policy. They are two different things. Greenspan may have wanted more deregulation—but he was in charge solely of monetary policy. He was answerable to Congress, and the President, for that. They weren’t answerable to him. Regulation is the domain of law and the enforcement of law. This is handled by Congress and the President. Not by the Fed chairman.

Bustillos uses several out-of-context quotes from Greenspan’s testimony before Congress, when he, like a lot of players, was called to answer for the 2008 fiasco. The fact remains that his only influence on the financial markets was as advisor and cheerleader. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is responsible for regulating the markets. The SEC is a creation of Congress and is answerable to Congress—not to the Fed chairman. Much of what the Congress did with their hearings (as with most congressional hearings) was for show. To evade their own responsibility in the matter. Or: politics, providing fodder for advocate commentators like Maria Bustillos.

As for what caused the 2008 collapse, there’s likely enough blame to go around on all sides, in both parties. An, er, “objective” journalist would see this. The creation of financial and economic bubbles might be instrinsic to the mega-Capitalist system we live in. How you handle them is as important as avoiding them. In both respects, the guy you’d want involved, in at least part of it, would be someone as famously tight as Mr. Greenspan. He did keep the massive bloated machine operating for twenty years, with all its dysfunctions, contradictions, and inefficiencies. No mean feat.

I wonder if Maria Bustillos and The Awl editors are as concerned about new financial bubbles being created, through the massive amounts of money—created out of thin air—currently being pumped into the Fed system. Do they care? Are they aware it’s happening?

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Another point of Maria Bustillos’ attack is her condemnation of Wall Street. Of so much wealth being funnelled to so few, and at that, those who create nothing themselves, but merely manipulate paper—or numbers on computer screens.

Here again, Maria Bustillos is being unfair, this time to Ayn Rand, who would condemn the crony capitalist manipulators of financial instruments on Wall Street. In both of her big novels, Ayn Rand’s strongest scorn is for that affluent and well-connected layer of “parasites” who suck wealth from the system. Rand lauds instead the producers, the manufacturers, the designers—the actual creators of marketable products. Don’t take my word for it. Read the novels. See for yourself.

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No, Maria Bustillos, like her friend Tom Bissell, isn’t a fair-minded journalist. Like so many other of her peers, she’s a propagandist. The objective is to construct a distorted straw man of your opponent so you can knock it down. The troubling aspect is that her mishmash of inept thought and misrepresentation is taken for legitimate journalism. At least when Ayn Rand put her propaganda onto the pages of novels, she made it coherent and compelling.

Is Maria Bustillos an Objectivist, or a Marxist?

Likely she’s a little of both. But chiefly, Bissell and Bustillos are fashionable liberals who believe in little of nothing. They like the idea of changing this nation’s hierarchies—or of being perceived as liking the idea. They just don’t want to change the hierarchy they work in.

We live in an Age of Propaganda. A time when slanted opinions come at the reader or viewer from every direction. A time when being “well-educated” means having a superficial knowledge of subjects—as Bustillos has—having done some reading or research in the areas one proposes to write about, but (like Tom Bissell with the ULA) having no knowledge in depth. The glibness and facile ethics of the propagandists, and the ignorance of their audience, allows them to get away with it.

And so the essayist can belch up, from his-or-her depths, like a stage medium in performance, a long rant which connects with the prejudices of their readership, and at the same time is plausible enough to be believed by that scantly educated “educated” readership.

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There are reasons, beyond those of ideology and politics, why Ayn Rand has been universally hated (hated not too strong a word) by the established literary community. This, despite her feminism. Despite the reality that most who inhabit the literary scene are not models of altruism, but are instead hugely ambitious, egoistic, often supremely selfish individuals.

That’s one of the reasons right there. Rand’s naked celebration of the artistic ego is too blatant. It conflicts not with the reality of these people, but their adopted face.

The other reason may lie in Ayn Rand’s attacks on artistic cronyism in The Fountainhead. Her depiction of literary dilettantes and fakes. Her satirical scenes are perhaps too close to the way the literary scene operates.

In her essay, Maria Bustillos refers to the gap in the Soviet Union between nomenklatura and the population as if it were Stalin’s doing, and not a natural process inevitable to Marxism; to any attempt to impose upon a people a tops-down controlling state. The inevitable rise of bureaucracy. The unavoidable proliferation of bureaucrats wielding maximum authority.

Isn’t a nomenklatura the affliction of American literature today? To have standing to speak on literary subjects one should be certified; legitimized by academies, or by gates and gatekeepers. The literary herd operates as a unit, intolerant of unfamiliar ideas. It’s a mindset the Underground Literary Alliance fought against. A mindset embodied in Tom Bissell and Maria Bustillos.

Bissell made his career by accommodating powerful literary individuals such as Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers. From his days as an intern at Harpers he played the cronyistic game, and has never stopped playing it.

Maria Bustillos, advocate of the downtrodden, was fine with Bissell taking cheap shots at the renegade writers of the ULA. Her own contradictions and the contradictions in today’s literary scene don’t matter to her. Power matters. The Believer/McSweeney’s empire, narcissistic and individualistic to the max, with its own cult leader, is a center of literary power. Would Maria Bustillos mess with these people? I think not. You’ll see no critical essays from her or from anyone about them. So much safer to beat up on outcast American rebels—or on a long-dead American novelist—instead.

Friday, December 20, 2013

IF I’m to do anything again with literature—God knows why I’d want to—it would be with the Underground Literary Alliance name. Using it would be the only chance I or a project of mine would have to cut through the noise. There remains some brand equity in the name, due to its explosive reputation and its unparalleled history.

This, and my own proven abilities, are assets which could be used by alternative writers—or for any attempt to renew the scene. They would also be assets for ULA opponents. Let’s face it—the current literary scene is stale. Static. It defines the word stagnancy. The ULA throughout its history represented excitement; would be there to be used by the adventurous, if only in the role of villains!

Points that I’m pondering, in this downtrodden town—during my temporary visit—for the rats or the pigeons.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

1.) CONFORMISM. As I’ve oft stated, from top to bottom in American literature there’s a herd mentality. No one will publicly buck the status quo and advocate for change. Everyone is infected with “go-along-to-get-along” disease. No one will point out the corruption and cronyism that does exist in the scene. Everyone prefers to look the other way. You’ll find scarcely one person of courage and integrity. I know this from experience.

2.) BUBBLISM. Most of today’s young literati are hipsters. Many of them have congregated in Brooklyn, or in similar Hipstervilles around the country. I’ve noted in my encounters with this crowd, off-line and on, that they can’t handle disagreement. Few of them have experienced the give-and-take of no-holds-barred debate. They rely on premises, assumptions, assertions that to them are laws, because everyone in their world accepts them. This isn’t a healthy situation for any art or intellectual scene.

They’re in fact thousands of Bubble Boys from “Seinfeld,” who’ve carried their bubbles with them. Those they interact with at their hangouts look and think exactly like them.

If you study the hipster phenomenon, as one would a variety of animal, you see they’ve adopted protective coloration to try to blend in with their new urban environments. Note the beards and gritty working-class garb; the thrift shop affectations. Yet only the outer surface has changed. They’ve brought with them their gentrified upscale tastes—as seen in the new chic menus, designer beers, and upscale prices at bars and bistros which have sprung up or redesigned themselves to cater to them.

As it affects literature, there’s little chance of converting them to new ways of approaching the literary art, when everyone of them flees and blocks their mind from the slightest critique of what they see as wonderful and safe.

3.) INABILITY TO SEE REALITY. An example of this is the unquestioning believe in a pagan nature myth like global warming/climate change, which is a variation of Eve-eating-the-apple: mankind punished for its sins and hubris.

The inability to see reality applies to their art. An objective observer flipping through their literary flagship, The New Yorker, and glancing at the month’s enclosed story, should see immediately that this is a bad product; a poor entry point for readers to jump into the joys of fiction. Long paragraphs of dense prose, of hardly any dialogue or scene. (Like this blog post!) It’s as if the stories are created to be intentionally offputting to those not of the proper breeding. It’s no way to expand an art—in fact for the past several decades such stories produced by the thousands have narrowed it. Yet when you read the opinions of literati, high and low, in prestigious magazines or on on-line websites, these kind of literary stories are portrayed as tremendous achievements. Well, maybe they are—if one could read them. They’re terrible models, terrible examples of what the literary art at its best can achieve.

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Ever watch a television commercial with the sound off? You become aware of how the ad is pure manipulation. Every shot is carefully planned. The laughing happy baby followed by a shot of an easily-gliding new car. Hundreds of hours of thought and expertise go into a one-minute advertisement. That one minute could be broken down into its constituent parts, to discover what effect is intended, and how that effect is arrived at.

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The mainstream media, for all their supposed objectivity, create pure propaganda. The major outlets, from New York Times to Salon to Slate, do very much have a slant. Their journalists, in the mode of Tom Bissell, are hired for their ability to make the slant sound plausible. They’re not journalists. They’re propagandists.

Yesterday I noted a tweet from Slate regarding a business article by Matthew Yglesias. The tweet said, “Dividends are evil.” Not inefficient. Inanimate tool that they are, they’re “evil.” We’re not in the realm of economics, but religion. Agendas. Slants. The tweet’s author has apparently never read George Orwell on the topic of the corruption of language and thought. Or what the person read is long forgotten.

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In view of the manipulation of TV commercials, what do we say about larger projects, like a two-hour motion picture? Is it propaganda? Does it manipulate the viewer?

Even a classic like “The Wizard of Oz,” as great a film as it is, is highly manipulative. Watch for the devices of plot, or the shots of Toto, or Auntie Em.

View a movie like “Jaws” with the sound off and you see shot after shot which manipulates you the observer to be properly thrilled, or concerned, or scared. To identify with the characters, or hate the shark.

To me, then, it’s ridiculous for purveyors of sadistic movies of no moral purpose other than engaging the senses in a kind of bloodlust—moviemakers like Quentin Tarantino for example—to claim their movies have no effect on members of the audience. Of course they have effect. We can only wonder or fear what that effect is.

If media didn’t mess with people’s heads, directing minds this way and that, there would be no television commercials; no billion-dollar industry catering to the manipulative whims of public service campaigns, politicians. and marketing departments.

Friday, December 13, 2013

MOST NOVELS take place solely on the surface. The author presents the thoughts of his conscious mind—but isn’t in touch with his own subconscious depths, let alone the irrational depth-expressions of society at large. Think Jonathan Franzen. What you see is what you get. At that, the conscious ideas of the man are embarrassingly shallow.

My two ebook novels, THE TOWER and THE MCSWEENEYS GANG, aren’t so much narratives as nightmares. The former in particular is filled with symbols, amid the plotting and expressions of characters’ thoughts.

The symbols are codes pointing the way into the subconscious mind. Markers. Read it and find out.

Monday, December 09, 2013

THE THING TO KNOW concerning myself and any possible attempt to revive the Underground Literary Alliance is that the ULA exists within the culture in a kind of prison camp, surrounded by guards and watch towers. Not a physical camp, mind you, but a mental construction of one. The image of the ULA which exists within established literature’s mind is the creation of distorted narratives about us. No one can see the reality—or wants to see it.

Within the prison camp I exist as a Hannibal Lector figure. Confined to a straitjacket while strapped to a chair on an open concrete floor, observed by spotlights. The writer pariah, untouchable by the literary community. It’s an impossible situation, because the more you try to escape from the straitjacket, the crazier you seem.

I realized this over a year ago, when I attempted to counter gross distortions and lies about the ULA which were perpetuated by a republished essay about the organization. The essay was receiving glowing reviews from a score of reviewers—including in the New York Times—despite its inaccuracies. In the essay, the ULA’s grass roots DIYers are portrayed as would-be totalitarians, simply for wanting to have any kind of a voice in this hectic society. (The fate of the Underground Literary Alliance of course well proves who are the real totalitarians.)

As I contacted various editors to present the other (real) side of the story, I encountered in almost every instance a priori hostility. I knew none of these people, nor did they know me, but on the question of the ULA their minds were settled. The accepted narrative, false as it was, had become the hardened reality.

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The conflict between the Underground Literary Alliance and the larger lit world was a difference of temperament and ideas. The warm morality of the ULA cause, our uninhibited freedom, versus the cold expediency of inflexible cultural conformity. Against indoctrinated system writers marching in lockstep and single file, there was and is no room for those who occasionally step out of line.

The flaw in the original ULA strategy was thinking that our actions and revelations would provoke the conscience of the greater literary community. We couldn’t comprehend that said animal has no conscience. That it’s an unthinking beast concerned only with its own survival.

If we play-acted as radicals, our opponents play-acted as persons of integrity.

The result was that we provoked the literati’s monstrous true face. We were quickly ostracized.

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Banished! Which leaves me unable to aspire to any kind of a normal writer’s life. Should I begin any association with other writers, no matter how tame and innocuous, they would be tarred by the association. The paranoid fear of possible dissent existing within the established literary community would quickly again reach levels of hysteria. Anything we said would be received through a prism of mendacity and dishonesty.

Within the cultural straitjacket, then, my possible actions are constrained. The script has been written—”abandon all hope, ye who enter”—which means that if I’m to do anything it must be in the guise of the crazy. Extreme. Possible colleagues would have to be themselves outcasts, those with no possibility of being accepted themselves, for whatever reasons. It wouldn’t be the ULA which existed ten years ago, with its amateur theatrics and—when all was said and done—rather tame personalities. It would be the Underground Literary Alliance gone nuclear. With no quarter given, none would be asked. Balls to the wall writing and activism done on speed.

Not that this is going to happen. I’m simply saying that given the circumstances, the closed walls faced, it’s the only way of operating that could happen. A cultural scorched earth policy with intensity matching that of the ULA’s ruthless and unmovable enemies.

Thursday, December 05, 2013

Someone needs to come along and artistically shatter literature's Gordian Knot-- a pagan gnostic symbol aptly matching our solipsistic literature of careful intricacies able to be approached only by students of the Eleusinian Mysteries. Popularly known as MFAers.

Alexander at Gordium in effect said, "Enough of this shit." He showed the boldness necessary to attempt the conquest of Persia, which at the time was civilization's status quo.

As I told moderate members of the Underground Literary Alliance ten years ago, there's no reforming a thoroughly corrupt, insular, stagnant literary system. The established lit world is as hierarchical and backward as was Darius's Persia. There's no correcting it. No baby steps. No carefully going along with literature's High Priests in hopes they'll give up a smidgen of power.

Sunday, December 01, 2013

That thought popped briefly into my head—only briefly—after running into a former ULAer a couple weeks ago. Could the once-notorious literary organization come back? Should it?

Even the ULA’s opponents now must recognize that our arguments were right. The literary scene is as stagnant as ever. No controversy or excitement to be found anywhere. No contention. No new ideas. That the very uninteresting and unoriginal follow-the-status-quo Alice Munro won the Nobel confirms almost every point we made.

When I was directing the ULA, every move we made was exciting.

Likely, to bring the ULA back would require an entirely new team, with me overseeing it. I’d do little more than that—but I would do it. No one besides myself has the force of personality necessary to make the right amount of noise—nor a storehouse of tactics and polemics. One thing I still carry is my voice.

These are stray musings. The odds against such a move, such a restored movement, remain impossible.

One thing for certain: If the organization does come back, under new guise or old, this’ll be the last place where it will be announced!

Monday, November 25, 2013

Seeing Through It means seeing through the layers of bullshit surrounding us on all sides, coming from the political, cultural, educational, and media establishments. It’s what I’ve tried to do on this blog and with my literary actions. Also with my ebooks.

THE TOWER, a novel, makes a good starting point. For all its chaos, it shows several sides of today’s debates, and raises questions about this mad society and those who play in it and run it. The characters are toxic. Available still via Nook or Kindle. Check it out!

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

ANYTHING of note taking place in the literary world? Exciting new novels? Radical departures from business-as-usual? Innovative attempts to reconnect the art with the general public? OR, just the same-old same-old?

Like most folks, I’ve lost much of my interest. My reading list consists of 19th century classics, books about movies, and historical works.

The narrative presented by the ostensibly non-partisan producers carried overtones of McCarthyism and blacklists; pariahs and outcasts—a topic to which I’m receptive, for obvious reasons.

They told the tale of one Josh Inglett, former star Wisconsin high school quarterback, who was nominated for a position on the University of Wisconsin’s Board of Governors. The nomination was withdrawn by Governor Scott Walker’s office—apparently because Josh Inglett had signed a recall petition against the governor.

The NPR commentator narrated with the voice of moral seriousness and controlled public outrage. How bad was the offense, to merit a nationwide broadcast on NPR? Josh Inglett, a somewhat privileged young man, might’ve gotten a plum spot. If he had received the position, he’d have been wonderfully fortunate. (Especially considering his age.) But he didn’t get it.

Did Inglett’s signing of the petition justify Scott Walker’s staff looking elsewhere for their candidate? Depends on how you look at it. To me, trying to get someone recalled from his position—kicked out of his job—is as personal as you can get. (Expecting that same man to give you a job is asking much, at least in the real world.)

It’s laudable that “This American Life” goes after injustice. They looked long and hard, apparently, to find an example of it—discovering it, coincidentally, in the camp of one of the liberal establishment’s political enemies: the staff of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

I’m sure “This American Life” examined first all the many patronage positions given out by Democratic officeholders, for examples of apparent unfairness—but just couldn’t find any!

So instead: poster child Josh Inglett, former star high school quarterback, positioned to receive, after a lifetime of struggle, a patronage position, at the tender age of 23!—and he didn’t get it. Horrors. Proof, to the NPR listener, that life is truly unfair.

The National Public Radio story is in fact a subtle hatchet job. Reminiscent to me of the hatchet jobs done on the Underground Literary Alliance ten years ago.

No, we weren’t coming from the Right in our attacks on the liberal establishment, our exposes of corruption, but we were a threat to the elite liberal image of perfection. We were also Do-It-Yourselfers; crude, independent voices not properly vetted by said establishment. We were aliens, as alien to the Perfect People as Tea Partiers are now, and so we had to be destroyed.

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Interesting to me, in the NPR story, were the mentions of the Tea Party, which was brought into the narrative as a kind of dark, offstage force. The true villains in the piece, according to NPR; pushing for a vendetta against young Mr. Inglett, innocent victim.

Josh Inglett probably is the lamb NPR portrays him to be. Why did Josh sign the recall petition against Scott Walker? For his mother! Josh Inglett signed the petition not out of conviction, but for his schoolteacher mother. Granted, a son’s loyalty is always (usually?) laudable, but I’m not sure someone of such tender age, lacking as yet independent control of his own mind, was quite the individual Wisconsin taxpayers wanted on that Board of Governors.

But, the Tea Party. The NPR story’s subtext. Implied: dangerous. The standard NPR listener reacts in fear and outrage at the very mention of the name, so thorough has been the media’s creation of the stereotype.

This is a standard tactic—one I saw used often against the Underground Literary Alliance. Call it “Flipping the Script.” It’s a useful tool for shutting down dissent. Small-d democratic populists become portrayed as the very thing they’re fighting against. The very purpose and thrust of the Tea Party is a call for decentralized power. Protest against what they see as a too-big authoritarian central government. They’ve been on the receiving end of the authoritarian power, as seen in the revelations of IRS machinations against them.

Though the populists have no power—other than their voices—they become the potential authoritarians in the standard narrative. As in NPR’s narrative. The tactic is Orwellian.

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This isn’t Propaganda 101. It’s a 700-level class. For grad students only.

More important than the actual story, and the tactical distortions created by it, is the media’s selection process. Which stories do we see? In a nation of 300 million people, there are hundreds of such stories at any moment to be found. For those who listen only to NPR, an entire carefully-selected distorted world can be created to give the slant NPR wishes to present.

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To my knowledge, National Public Radio has never examined corruption and cronyism in the ranks of themselves and their friends. Or in the privileged milieu from which they stem, of well-positioned, well-schooled like-minded writers and commentators.

Such as the established U.S. literary scene, for instance, which, as the ULA once claimed, is utterly stagnant, closed, and corrupt; aggressively intolerant of alternative voices. Either that, or the literary world is utterly wonderful, perfection itself, free of all prejudice—and there just happen to be no contrary voices to be found anywhere.

The narrative presented by the ostensibly non-partisan producers carried overtones of McCarthyism and blacklists; pariahs and outcasts—a topic to which I’m receptive, for obvious reasons.

They told the tale of one Josh Inglett, former star Wisconsin high school quarterback, who was nominated for a position on the University of Wisconsin’s Board of Governors. The nomination was withdrawn by Governor Scott Walker’s office—apparently because Josh Inglett had signed a recall petition against the governor.

The NPR commentator narrated with the voice of moral seriousness and controlled public outrage. How bad was the offense, to merit a nationwide broadcast on NPR? Josh Inglett, a somewhat privileged young man, might’ve gotten a plum spot. If he had received the position, he’d have been wonderfully fortunate. (Especially considering his age.) But he didn’t get it.

Did Inglett’s signing of the petition justify Scott Walker’s staff looking elsewhere for their candidate? Depends on how you look at it. To me, trying to get someone recalled from his position—kicked out of his job—is as personal as you can get. (Expecting that same man to give you a job is asking much, at least in the real world.)

It’s laudable that “This American Life” goes after injustice. They looked long and hard, apparently, to find an example of it—discovering it, coincidentally, in the camp of one of the liberal establishment’s political enemies: the staff of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

I’m sure “This American Life” examined first all the many patronage positions given out by Democratic officeholders, for examples of apparent unfairness—but just couldn’t find any!

So instead: poster child Josh Inglett, former star high school quarterback, positioned to receive, after a lifetime of struggle, a patronage position, at the tender age of 23!—and he didn’t get it. Horrors, to the NPR listener, that life is truly unfair.

The National Public Radio story is in fact a subtle hatchet job. Reminiscent to me of the hatchet jobs done on the Underground Literary Alliance ten years ago.

No, we weren’t coming from the Right in our attacks on the liberal establishment, our exposes of corruption, but we were a threat to the elite liberal image of perfection. We were also Do-It-Yourselfers; crude, independent voices not properly vetted by said establishment. We were aliens, as alien to the Perfect People as Tea partiers are now, and so we had to be destroyed.

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Interesting to me, in the NPR story, were the mentions of the Tea party brought into the narrative as a kind of dark, offstage force. The true villains in the piece, according to NPR; pushing for a vendetta against young Mr. Inglett, innocent victim.

Josh Inglett probably is the lamb NPR portrays him to be. Why did Josh sign the recall petition against Scott Walker? For his mother! Josh Inglett signed the petition not out of conviction, but for his schoolteacher mother. Granted, a son’s loyalty is always (usually?) laudable, but I’m not sure someone of such tender age, lacking as yet independent control of his own mind, was quite the individual Wisconsin taxpayers wanted on that Board of Governors.

But, the Tea Party. The NPR story’s subtext. Implied: dangerous. The standard NPR listener reacts in fear and outrage at the very mention of the name, so thorough has been the media’s creation of the stereotype.

This is a standard tactic—one I saw used often against the Underground Literary Alliance. Call it “Flipping the Script.” It’s a useful tool for shutting down dissent. Small-d democratic populists become portrayed as the very thing they’re fighting against. The very purpose and thrust of the Tea Party is a call for decentralized power. Protest against what they see as a too-big authoritarian central government. They’ve been on the receiving end of the authoritarian power, as seen in the revelations of IRS machinations against them.

Though the populists have no power—other than their voices—they become the potential authoritarians in the standard narrative. As in NPR’s narrative. The tactic is Orwellian.

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This isn’t Propaganda 101. It’s a 700-level class. For grad students only.

More important than the actual story, and the tactical distortions created by it, is the media’s selection process. Which stories do we see? In a nation of 300 million people, there are hundreds of such stories at any moment to be found. For those who listen only to NPR, an entire carefully-selected distorted world can be created to give the slant NPR wishes to present.

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To my knowledge, National Public Radio has never examined corruption and cronyism in the ranks of themselves and their friends. Or in the privileged milieu from which they stem, of well-positioned, well-schooled like-minded writers and commentators.

Such as the established U.S. literary scene, for instance, which, as the ULA once claimed, is utterly stagnant, closed, and corrupt; aggressively intolerant of alternative voices. Either that, or the literary world is utterly wonderful, perfection itself, free of all prejudice—and there just happen to be no contrary voices to be found anywhere.

Thursday, November 07, 2013

The Jonathan Martin-Richie Incognito NFL story is interesting because we’re left asking, “What’s the real story? What really happened?” We’re seeing how the same incident—colleagues getting up from a table—can have multiple interpretations. Obviously, the things which were happening were being perceived differently by Martin and by the team.

Much of history, much of literature, much of life is the search for objective truth. It’s not found by looking at a topic in a one-dimensional way. Better to at least try to understand all possible viewpoints. When you play chess, you see the game through the eyes of your opponent, if want to have hope of countering what he’s doing.

What of course frustrated me about my days with the Underground Literary Alliance—and which still concerns me about today’s literary scene—is how one, narrow, basically untrue viewpoint toward our campaign was grabbed hold of, deliberately by our opponents, and became the official narrative on us, as exemplified of course by Bissell’s egregious, widely circulated and wildly applauded essay. The entire literary scene believed it, gullibly. And these supposedly writers!? Those who should be on the alert at all times for the games and rationalizations, the untruths and machinations, guaranteed to come from an established narrative in any (intrinsically) flawed and corrupt human society. The writer first of anybody should know humans are flawed creatures. You should never automatically buy anything.

Real art comes from creating multiple dimensions of perception and meaning, at the same time pulling back the facades and masks obscuring the true story.

Monday, October 28, 2013

I CAN UNDERSTAND concerns about the omnipresence of new media, including social media outlets like Twitter, blogs, and Facebook. Too many people are letting social media seemingly to dominate their lives.

The flip side to these concerns is that new media at least presents in our society the possibility of alternate viewpoints.

Anymore, established media, especially that based on the east coast, gives us one way of thinking. Every “journalist” and spokesperson has the same assumptions about the world, the universe, and this nation. I call it monothink.

Monothink extends to the literary scene. This blog, with its contrary ideas, presents, for those who wish to find it—few as those individuals may be—an alternative way of considering American literature and its players. If it were up to the Overdogs who dominate approved literature, there would exist no contrary ideas. Anyplace.

I’m a rare person in that I enjoy the exhilaration of alternate ideas. Part of the excitement of reading The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand, for instance, is not simply that it’s a terrific novel, but also that it gives the reader a wholly different way of viewing our world. Most of today’s “intellectuals” fear to have their assumptions challenged. They’re incapable of engaging in the give-and-take of clashing ideas.

For now, the Internet remains a place to discover notions, some crazy and others not so crazy, that would never make it past the careful screening of established society’s designated gatekeepers.

Friday, October 25, 2013

All one need do is look at the short story The New Yorker has republished in its current (10/21/13) issue: "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." I didn't get past the overwritten first paragraph. Like most literary writers, Alice Munro is afflicted with detail disease. In the story she gives us a well-observed cataloging of minutiae. Is this guaranteed to hook anyone outside a creative writing course? Uh, no.

What Munro gives us, like so many of her literary establishment peers, is a bad model for the short story. All emphasis is on the "well-crafted sentence." This has become the lit world's highest value. And so they pile on impressive sentence after sentence, not caring that the sentences should be mere pieces toward a larger goal. As the work becomes coagulated, reading it becomes a slog.

Gatekeepers of the art like Heidi Pitlor are incapable of looking beyond the indoctrination of the writing program. Glance at Heidi's twitter account, @BAShortStories. She posts literary sentences which catch her interest. Plot? Theme? Excitement? Pace? Meaning? It's clear what Heidi Pitlor values.

Meanwhile, as Alice Munro has pursued her delicate and irrelevant art, interest in the short story from the general public has dwindled almost to nothingness. I've said before, I doubt if even many New Yorker subscribers read their fiction. Its purpose isn't to be read. Like a fashionable glossy magazine on a gentrified coffee table, the fiction exists as a taste marker. A sign of breeding and class.

The structure of the literary story today is particularly inapt in our A.D.D. era.

Short stories weren't always like Munro's. Once, writers got to it. "None of them knew the color of the sky." Yes, once, story writers like Stephen Crane, Jack London, and Ernest Hemingway could be descriptive but also vigorous and compelling. Painting a picture with a few brushstrokes-- not parked under the kitchen table jotting down like an observant cockroach every last teapot, cobweb, and kitchen spoon in the room.

(To read my own experiments in reviving the short story, pick up my ebook, TEN POP STORIES, at Kindle or Nook. Rumor has it the ebook is quite affordable. Each story is different. There's no excuse for not putting it onto your reading device!)

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p.s. Here's a link to typically overwritten gushy praise from literary establishment types about Alice Munro. I picture Joyce Carol Oates, while typing her remarks, simultaneously poking the eyes out of an Alice Munro doll, wanting to tell the world that after all, others also, including herself, SHE, have produced overwritten, Chekovian and even hysterical short stories-- sometimes very violent stories-- in her particular instance, quite a few of them; if people anyone SOMEONE is handing out awards to deserving or at least long-suffering writers. . . .

Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The writer, Eve Tushnet, uses "sublime" as almost the opposite of "beautiful." Yet the sublime is supposed to be the best in mankind. That which elevates us from the base. Horror movies, on the other hand, wallow in the base. Their effect comes from depictions of grossness and ugliness. They examine what's darkest within us.

Our culture today is in a full-on embrace of irrationality. Of nonstop media depictions of cruelty. Movies of horror, fantasy, and sadistic violence. That people enjoy these depictions says something about where we are now as a civilization. The greatest forms of art, the truly beautiful and sublime, have been shoved aside. We're more in pagan Rome than in what was once the good old U.S.A.-- which carried the heritage of the glories of Western civilization.

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In my newest ebook, ABOUT WESTERN MOVIES, I discuss a movie genre which can be cruel but can also be, at its best, very beautiful. I'll take that genre anyday over the unending savagery of horror movies, which once were an artistic curiosity but have gone completely mainstream, leaving confusion in their wake.

Many media commentators saw Scalia’s statements as a big joke. Yet how wrong was he?

I’ve been around enough to say I believe in the existence of evil. I’ve seen, once or twice, persons who seemed possessed by a spirit of evil.

When one studies history—the French Revolution, for instance—the idea of human evil becomes more tangible.

The question is whether or not evil is a personality, or the attribute of a personality. Or a living personality.

Is the notion of the devil childish? Or rather, is not the failure to believe in the evil in man and mankind—call that evil Original Sin, or call it the devil—the true childish viewpoint?

(As Scalia says, far more intelligent men than anyone alive today believed in the existence of the devil. Yet today’s intellectuals—nothing if not narrow-minded and arrogant—have all the answers. At least in their own uninquisitive minds.)

Wednesday, October 09, 2013

Here’s an interesting quote from famed film critic Pauline Kael, from an essay, “Are Movies Going to Pieces?” dating from December 1964:

“The ‘pure’ cinema enthusiast who doesn’t react to a film but feels he should, and so goes back to it over and over, is not responding as an individual but as a compulsive good pupil determined to appreciate what his cultural superiors say is art. Movies are on their way into academia when they are turned into a matter of duty, and in this country respect for High Culture is becoming a ritual.”

This situation today of course holds true even more for literature than for film. What we see now, even from the youngest generations—especially from them—is an unwillingness or inability to question the accepted premises handed down to them. The assumed gods. Which is not the path toward vibrant living art forms; only stagnating status quos. Dead art.

Monday, September 23, 2013

With the appearance of the Imax 3-D version of the 1939 classic movie The Wizard of Oz in theaters, I’ve written a review of the experience, but also added thoughts about what the various symbols contained therein, such as the ruby slippers, could mean. Here:

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Just as no established literary persons, or writers of any kind, dared publicly debate the Underground Literary Alliance after we destroyed the Paris Review staff at CBGB’s in New York City, February 2001—so not one of the many thousands of wonderful status quo writers, critics, and literary persons will to this day contest myself and my ideas anywhere, at any time, in any forum.

Has an art throughout history ever been so congealed with a mass of unquestioning conformity? Contrary opinions not only aren’t allowed. The possibility of their very existence is not considered. Writing academies produce waves upon waves of writers, throwing them upon the culture-at-large, yet you’ll look in vain for any who’ll dare disagree with the accepted gods and ways of doing things. It’s a prescription for obsolescence. The public still reads—mass market junk produced without thought. But said public has no longer any concept of American literature. Literature, in that sense, no longer exists—except on the rare occasion when the monopolistic media marketing machine can present an Insider writer like Jonathan Franzen AS IF he’s one more of the mass market crowd. His works frankly are mediocre enough to get away with it.

Nowhere are there any advances in the art. Nowhere are new ideas tried, or wanted. There’s an “avant-garde,” but it’s an avant-garde mimicking in every way, every sentence (but absent the radical intent) of avant-gardes of ages past. Of 100 years ago, really. Which means, not an avant-garde at all.

No advances are wanted, no criticism, no tests, no aesthetic combats. All is frozen. Sclerotic. Impregnable, but at the same time at any moment able to collapse, like the corrupt and complacent French empire of a Louis Napoleon, bolstering its arrogance on the glories of sixty years past.

I note that a frenzied and feverish literary intellect like Joyce Carol Oates, for instance—who’s been frenzied and feverish since 1960, and whose work and mentality haven’t budged one microcentimeter since then—is still taken seriously by following generations of well-indoctrinated literary scribblers. Not just taken seriously, but lauded, though her “ideas” and violently confused works could sustain no serious scrutiny, and never could, beyond some early short stories since then endlessly, year after year, reproduced with slight variations. The standing of Ms. Oates being one example of the refusal of new writers to artistically challenge the received artistic gods. Countless other examples could be given—but while other examples of the staleness of the art might surpass Oates in willful and obstinate mediocrity (see Franzen again), they’ve lasted not nearly so long.

Here I stand like a lonely knight, my flag planted, still waiting for the contest which will never come, while the vast armies of stasis, innumerable in their glittering yet cheap pot-metal armor—but not very confident—continue to keep their far distance from where my sword and flag stand planted as continuous challenge in the ground.

Monday, September 16, 2013

Here are a few passages I took out of my most recent ebook, ABOUT WESTERN MOVIES, because I didn’t want to beat my theme into the ground:

“If you have a major shootout every ten minutes, then you’ve lost all sense of proportion. You’re not building toward anything, are merely creating violence porn for violence groupies, with a serial killer as your hero.”

“Violence in art can be tragic and cathartic. When there’s too much of it, it merely benumbs. Today, in a real hopeless West—our depraved imaginative culture—maniac murderers shoot up movie theaters in Colorado. The minds of movie audiences have already been shot up. The violence now is simply jumping from the screen into the actual world.”

“Violence alone isn’t realism. The world is not all darkness.”

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Pick up my ebook, new-style film criticism, ABOUT WESTERN MOVIES, for a mere 99 cents at Nook or Kindle.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

Has anyone fully processed what happened viz-a-viz the United States, Russia, and Syria, this past week?

Has Vladimir Putin advanced that far on the p.r./diplomacy front, reinventing those fields—or is our government of Kerry, Obama and Company that spectacularly incompetent? It’s a week that will be studied by diplomatic historians and propaganda experts for decades to come.

Our preconceptions have been turned on their head. Tactics of the Cold War have been reversed. Starting with the Edward Snowden incident, Putin has become the man of intelligence, fair play, and peace. He’s done to the United States what the U.S. did to the Soviet Union. Namely, win the public relations battle. Putin seems to have learned well, adopting our skills, while we’ve regressed.

Case in point is the international TV show “Russia Today” (RT), fronted by hyper-beautiful and hyper-intelligent Abby Martin, who puts America’s crudely indoctrinated bubble-headed plastic Mainstream Media commentators to shame.

Here’s a look at Ms. Martin on a recent story, in an RT feature “Breaking the Set.” Click on the video. It’s very slick, with Abby Martin firmly on the side of the underdog:

Say what you will about Putin, but he’s doing something right, while our corrupt system is dependent not on the kind of talent and strategic skill ex-KGB man Putin exhibits, but on same-old same-old Ivy League mediocrities whose qualifications for promotion are an unquestioning willingness to be indoctrinated by a status quo ideological system and an unswaying ability to conform. (Even when not from the Ivy League, apparatchiks’ mendacity and ability to stretch the truth is noteworthy—as shown for example by cheap propagandist Tom Bissell, among many others.)

That President Obama and John Kerry—as well as previous President George W. Bush—are all Ivy Leaguers is not evidence against my thesis!

Thursday, September 12, 2013

One reason why I believe in the existence of God/a Creator is because I can’t conceive how order can be imposed upon the chaos of the universe without an intelligence behind it.

It’s the feeling I had upon finishing Thomas Carlyle’s masterwork, The French Revolution. The collected intelligences of men of the Age of Reason, who made a god of reason, produced from their efforts violence, chaos, and terror. The disorder didn’t end until a unitary intelligence, in the person of Napoleon, imposed order upon French society via cannon fire.

Order from chaos, via a strong intelligence, explains much of French history. Charles De Gaulle rescued the French nation twice; in 1940-46 and in 1958, times when the combined voices of his countrymen were producing disintegration. Only he—no one else—could’ve rescued the French nation.

In my own experience, I know that the Underground Literary Alliance failed because it tried to run itself via group consensus, instead of unitary leadership.

Democracy is fine once the universe—or nation or movement—has been created. Creating the universe, putting it on a solid foundation, without an overarching intelligence seems an impossible feat.

Tuesday, September 03, 2013

The latest scare story making the rounds on the Internet is the contention that the oceans are acidifying “at the fastest rate in 300 million years.”

This is the kind of thing it takes only a moment of thought to wonder about. Not 30 years—which no doubt has been measured. Not 300 years, which might be questionable, but okay. No. The promoters of this one go all the way. 300 MILLION years! Ohmygod! Help!

The public today is so braindead unquestioning about media hype that many of them accept this on face value. Needless to say, we have no real way of knowing what was happening 300 million years ago. Or 30 million years ago, for that matter. It’s all guess work—but enough to set a mass movement upon, and hold colorful demonstrations in unthinking places like San Francisco filled with the need-to-believe heal the planet mob.

Not that they’ll change anything about their San Fran lifestyles. It’s gesture politics to make them feel good—in the same way that lobbing a few missiles at Syria is a gesture intended to make us—or someone—feel good. We—he—did something. Now let’s continue what we were otherwise doing.

How hard did the New York Times and John Eligon have to look to find the guy? Yes, the individual is misguided; what he’s doing is terrible. But: the front page? Really?

What’s the point? What exactly are you trying to prove? Don’t you realize that the net result of such mainstream media bombardments of every example found of existing racism is to further divide this country? To further alienate the races?

I’m a native of the troubled city of Detroit and have seen the result of distrust between blacks and whites—what it leads to. As I’m back living in this city, whose hope is dependent on racial cooperation, I can only say to the New York Times and other agenda-following elite media outlets: Stop. Please.

Friday, August 23, 2013

“Time was when men could (so to speak) of a given man, by nourishing and decorating him with fit appliances, to the due Pitch, make themselves a King, almost as the Bees do; and what was still more to the purpose, loyally obey him when made.”

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

“Alas, the Sorbonne still sits there, in its old mansion, but mumbles only jargon of dotage, and no longer leads the consciences of men: not the Sorbonne, it is Encyclopedias, Philosophic, and who knows what nameless multitude of ready Writers, profane Singers, Romancers, Players, Disputators, and Pamphleteers, that now form the Spiritual Guidance of the world.”

Monday, August 19, 2013

What I like about Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution is its sarcastic tone. The way he illustrates with example after example the foolishness of Man as Rational Being.

We see this with our politicians and legislators today. Instead of accepting nature, the complexity and anarchy of nature, and allowing for it, channeling it, we have instead politician Professors who believe they can order and regulate everything, all parts and activities of society. They, themselves, with their smugly intelligent rationalistic brains.

Reading Carlyle gives perspective on monstrosities like Obama’s 2800-page health care act intended to control every minute aspect of health care throughout this gigantic country—2800 pages of law culminating in 20,000—give or take—pages of federal regulations to implement and enforce such unwieldy rationalistic mess.

Like so much else coming down from on high, the premise is an absurdity on the face of it.

Sunday, August 18, 2013

I’ve been reading Carlyle’s massive masterpiece The French Revolution, the idea being that we need to study other times in order to understand our own time. One conclusion I’ve already drawn is that, present in any age is a great deal of irrationality. Yet, conversely, the greatest danger comes from those who believe they’re acting rationally. We’re flawed creatures, liable often as not to be wrong. The first step toward true enlightenment is to recognize that.

Anyway, here’s an interesting quote from Thomas Carlyle, with echoes of today:

“But of those decadent ages in which no Ideal either grows or blossoms? When Belief and Loyalty have passed away, and only the cant and false echo of them remains; and all Solemnity has become Pageantry; and the Creed of persons in authority has become one of two things: an Imbecility or a Machiavelism?”

Thursday, August 15, 2013

I was in a quick online exchange a while back when the term “bureaucratic necessities” came up. I pointed to “bureaucratic necessities” as a major problem with our culture. Yes, it is, the person responded—but that’s why you can’t attack anyone.

Well, then I’ve certainly done things wrong, which is why I’m blackballed. Still, as William Holden says in The Wild Bunch, “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

I was raised on America’s myths. Then-realities and myths which are quickly vanishing in this detestable New Age. One of those myths is that being a man means being unafraid to speak honestly. To call out corruption and deception wherever one sees it.

Friday, August 09, 2013

The centerpiece of The New Yorker’s August 5 summer fiction issue is a story by Shirley Jackson named “Paranoia.” In style the short story reads like any other New Yorker short story published over the past year. Being from Shirley Jackson, it’s more entertaining than the run-of-the-mill NewYorker story. The biggest difference between “Paranoia” and other well-crafted New Yorker stories is that the story “Paranoia” by Shirley Jackson is 60 years old.

Did the run-of-the-mill New Yorker reader notice?

Likely not. In the first place, fiction appearing in The New Yorker is never read, A.) because the magazine’s purpose isn’t to be read, but to sit upon refined coffee tables in upscale residences from Manhattan to Newport Beach (but not very much in Newport Beach) as a marker of breeding and good taste—the unique cover announcing the week’s message; and B.) because the pieces that are actually read when an ambitious subscriber decides to read the magazine are the movie reviews and show listings, maybe the week’s big think piece, but never—never—the fiction. That the magazine still publishes “fiction,” even if no one reads the fiction, is all that’s required. “Oh, the fiction,” a person responds, looking at the Table of Contents. “Still there. Good.”

In on-line blurbs for the issue, The New Yorker hearkens back to a previous NewYorker story by Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery,” which received more mail response than any story they’ve ever published, before or since. “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson was published in 1948!

With today’s establishment-produced “fictions” we’re not talking about a healthy art form. There’s not been a lot of change in it. Over 60+ years of presenting the same thing, the few remaining publishers of literary short stories have lost their audience. Renowned-but-little-read short story writer Charles Baxter acknowledges as much in a Daily Beast interview this week, with hardly a shrug. No attempt to understand the reasons. No desire to create something strikingly new. Charles Baxter has been writing the same kind of short stories for thirty years (not a long period from The New Yorker’s perspective). One thing we can bet about the short stories Baxter has published then and now is that they haven’t changed one iota. Since no one reads them, beyond dutiful writing students eager to learn how to duplicate them, does it matter?

A healthy art form—think of rock music from 1964 to 1967—is engulfed in explosions of creative discoveries everyplace, new trails blazed, the standard centerpiece of the art (the pop song) presenting radical new experiments and experiences by the week.

In literature, we get the unchanging literary story. As unchanged in 60 years as the proverbial generic McDonald’s hamburger left on a plate that never changes, always looking the same.

But The New Yorker is happy, and if they’re happy, the unthinking unblinking literary herd is also happy. Yes. A good year for the short story. 1948!

Friday, August 02, 2013

Have we had enough yet of political correctness, “sensitivity training” and the like?

A major goal of America’s media and culture the past forty years has been to attack, discredit, and maybe destroy that most deadly of all animals: the white male. Blamed for all ills. The thought being that this society would be better without his existence. Ignoring, of course, that this civilization is almost entirely the product of the vision and ambition of said creature.

I address this question in my new ebook, ABOUT WESTERN MOVIES, in my essay on the Sam Peckinpah classic, The Wild Bunch, starring William Holden. A couple excerpts:

“The last outlaw. Also the last man, if what has defined men for millennia is now outlawed. Namely, his macho ethos and his uncompromising violence. His need to impose his will upon the world. In Holden's performance is the heritage of the West, and of the white male, long since deemed by academics and experts to be the walking embodiment of cruelty and oppression. With this film, director Sam Peckinpah defiantly embraces that cruel and glorious legacy.”

And:

"The Wild Bunch is the end of the Western. Peckinpah's characters, in their presence, carry the myth; as their actions display the genre's psychotic violence. The aging heroes immolate themselves in an orgy of movie violence. Take away the West, take away their freedom, and no other path for them is left. No place remains for their kind of male.

“The West, in this scenario, equates with freedom-- absolute freedom.”

It’s as if Peckinpah saw what was coming and reacted to it. Surely at one point in this culture, a dose of p.c. liberalism was the right medicine. I celebrate it in my ebook’s essay on the 1960 masterpiece, The Magnificent Seven. In 1960, liberalism reached the peak of its relevance. Today it’s a very different animal.

Now political correctness has become a double standard used merely as a power lever, a way for some classes of people to bully another class of people; no fairness about it; no equal application anywhere. Please don’t tell me what I can or can’t say unless you put those same restrictions on yourself.

Sam Peckinpah’s message might be that restrictions, brainwashings, and controls can be pushed too far. In America, freedom is the ultimate value.

ABOUT WESTERN MOVIES contains provocative writing and is available at Nook and Kindle.

The two articles are right out of a Tom Wolfe book about the 1960’s, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. (If Katy Waldman had had a real education, she’d have read it.) The two articles are in fact a fairly faithful reenactment.

There is structural racism (and classism) in America. It’s best reflected, ironically, in the hierarchical nature of the educational system. In their discussion, both women, and other women cited (patriarchical men being obviously beyond hope) are products of that stratified system.

(Katy Waldman is a graduate of Yale University. As every President from Bush I in 1988 on has been a product of Yale or Harvard, which shows an undemocratic monopoly of the position, it’s been my contention that the first step in democratizing the U.S. would be to close both institutions.)

Indeed, Slate magazine, despite its p.c. liberal posturing, is quite undemocratic, in that its hirees are invariably cluelessly privileged snots from elite, mainly Ivy League colleges.

When you play the Grievance Game—I’ve admittedly been a part-time practitioner-- it can eventually become so ridiculous that the only choice left is to throw up one’s hands and admit we’re living in a madhouse. As the articles from the two ladies well prove.

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Here’s the truth of the matter. While the weeks-long focus on the Trayvon/Zimmerman case serves to reinforce both the grievance of the grad student and the guilt of the Salon editor, it has other consequences.

It divides, not unites, the races in this country. If you care to see what this can lead to, come visit Detroit, poster child of white-black division, to NO ONE’s benefit.

Let’s keep in mind as well that George Zimmerman is himself bi-racial, a working class man who was living in a working class neighborhood. That he became poster child for the nation’s ills, and its presumed collective guilt, tells me the media isn’t interested in addressing real issues, or in reality at all, but in playing out psychodramas while distracting the masses.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

I have an Ebook for sale, containing three novelettes about life in the beat-down and tumultuous city of Detroit. The stories were inspired by my brief sojourn here in 2008. (I’m currently on another temporary stay in Motown, living inexpensively near downtown until I raise the funds to return to Philly.) I love the city—I was born here—but it’s a tough place.

The three tales are A.) “Kevin and Koreena”: a love story. B.) “The Zeen Writer”: a low-rent young vagabond writer arrives in the Motor City. C.) “Bluebird”: the story of a rock band led by two very different women.

Actress Natalie Wood is dolled up, Hollywood-style. Which undercuts the reality, just a trifle.

We're not in the real West in "The Searchers." We're inside a Hollywood dreamscape. A gorgeous dreamscape. While "The Searchers" is not the #1 Greatest Western in my new Ebook, ABOUT WESTERN MOVIES (Kindle or Nook), I much prefer it to more contemporary Westerns intent on portraying the West solely as a brutal and unattractive landscape.

The question here is: Why is "The Searchers" so highly ranked by liberal elite film critics?

Part of it is simple herd mentality. A consensus on the film has been reached. Students are told in the academy it's the greatest movie Western. The best academy students are nothing if not obedient. They rise through the educational system by eagerly raising their hands, always giving the expected answer.

Instinctive trend followers like Jonathan Lethem sniff out this consensus. They make their way by presenting what the herd wants to read: confirmations of indoctrinated herd conclusions and ideas. Lethem writes a long essay about his experiences viewing "The Searchers." No judgement given about the movie. None desired. Lethem's essays are about feelings, which invariably are feelings to which other well-placed herd members can relate.

But, there has to be more. "The Searchers" must genuinely touch something real and deep within many of these people. The sensitive Geoffrey O'Briens, if not the opportunistic Jonathan Lethems.

Contrary to what O'Brien claims, what touches them isn't aesthetic unity. "Shane," for instance, has aesthetic unity. It's better as a pure work of art. Even slightly lesser Westerns like Henry King's "The Bravados" and Anthony Mann's "The Far Country" have better artistic unity than does "The Searchers."

Is it then the depiction of racism in "The Searchers" which appeals strongly to the film's advocates? Yes and no. The 1946 Western, "Duel in the Sun," presents a more blatant image of white racism, beginning with the big opening saloon scene, on through the depictions of the characters played by Lionel Barrymore and grinning bad son Gregory Peck. Peck's exploitation of Jennifer Jones's half-breed Pearl, his love-hate feelings toward her-- a mix of contempt and attraction for her-- is melodramatic, yet intense and real. It's also a naked metaphor for larger exploitation.

In "The Searchers" we have white captive Natalie Wood exploited by Indian Chief Henry Brandon. As in "Duel," both actors are Hollywood attractive-- victimizer and victim-- and both are actually white. (Meaning, the actors are white.) What's different is the racial equation: the person victimized.

What notes does the story of "The Searchers" play on intellectuals? Why does this film move them, while "Duel in the Sun" fails?

I don't have an answer. I suspect "The Searchers" presents white liberals' own fears toward the Other. In John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards they're seeing replayed their own attitudes. Their own deeply-buried fear and racism suddenly bubbles up before them on a movie screen. I can see how for them it can be a shocking experience.

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It's un-p.c. for me to say it, but didn't this same elite white liberal community project their own fears and racism onto hapless watchman George Zimmerman?

Zimmerman as overzealous cop-wannabe? Likely. Zimmerman as racist?

Zimmerman is a bi-racial man whose past shows anything but racism toward black people. We now know his history-- tutoring black kids; taking a black woman to his prom. Living in a mixed-race environment-- an environment that made him far more experienced, nuanced and real about race relations than the sheltered Ivy League-spawned white-guilt media commentators judging him. The media show we're subjected to is merely the working out of a media-elite psychodrama. The creation of another movie.

It would be much safer for America and race relations if they kept the psychodramas in art house revival movie theaters, via classic Western movies, rather than impose their psychic fears, guilts, and needs upon greater society.

Sunday, July 14, 2013

The Geoffrey O’Brien essay in the New York Review ofBooks, “Implacable in Texas,” like everything in the NYRB except the advertisements says more about the mindset of today’s critical establishment than it does about its topic.

The essay’s topic is Glenn Frankel’s book on the 1956 John Ford Western “The Searchers.” Geoffrey O’Brien equals Glenn Frankel, in that O’Brien agrees with everything Frankel says. They carry the exact same viewpoint toward the movie and the historical circumstances behind the movie. They could be the same person.

The Geoffrey O’Brien essay is filled with questionable assertions and canyon-sized leaps. Including a canyon in his essay he’s completely missed.

“Are these later episodes scenes that John Ford could’ve filmed?” O’Brien asks loudly about the inability of rescued white captives to readapt to white society.

Except, John Ford did film those scenes, a mere five years later, in “Two Rode Together.”

Geoffrey O’Brien asserts: “—gestures and exchanged glances also establish that Ethan and Martha love each other.”

NO. They don’t “establish” anything—except within the cultural establishment. O’Brien is repeating an assertion which has become established. The gestures suggest that Ethan and Martha might love each other. Or that Ward Bond believes they might. Or maybe he’s just drinking his coffee. Repeat the inference enough times and everybody believes it.

O’Brien: “The search advances. . . .”

No, it meanders.

O’Brien: “There is an aesthetic unity. . . .”

No. There are fragments of unattained aesthetic unity.

O’Brien: “But the poison that seeps into ‘The Searchers’ is the mixing of bloodlines.”

A melodramatic sentence and an overstatement.

Other Westerns are stronger on the racial theme, or on racism, including ‘Two Rode Together,’ but many others, even ‘Duel in the Sun’ and ‘One-Eyed Jacks,’ not to mention ‘Ulzana’s Raid,’ which is much tougher and more “shocking” on the white-Indian conflicts than either of Ford’s movies. Conversely, another Western, “The Magnificent Seven,” handles the theme of racism far more subtly than Ford’s much hailed movie.

“The Searchers” is stagey in that it telegraphs everything. John Wayne looks ominously off-screen, directing the audience. “Don’t ask me,” he intones. “Don’t ever ask me.” Dark shadows, someplace, which we never see. They’re in the wings of the theatre.

O’Brien: “—it channels a live current of emotion directly from some unhealed hurt, some old well of fear.”

Here Geoffrey O’Brien is layering on the bathos, bathos which thankfully isn’t too much in the movie.

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Author Glenn Frankel has written an excellent book, but the book itself contains at least one huge leap. Frankel says about the religious settler family, the Parkers: “They were tribesmen and warriors, just one tenuous step removed from barbarism. Not so different, in truth, from the native peoples they met along the way.”

This is a gigantic leap, seeing that the Parkers and the Comanche Indians came from vastly different cultures, at completely different levels of civilization. Yet I’m sure that reviewer Geoffrey O’Brien agrees with Frankel’s statement implicitly.

Frankel’s statement is revealing. It says a great deal about the world view of the two men; about how they view America’s past and how they view elements of American society. I think it says much about how the intellectual class views, for instance, someone like Sarah Palin. It’s a viewpoint, not incidentally, which has colored depictions of the West, and Westerners, over the last 40 years of moviemaking.

It’s a topic I cover in my new About Western Movies ebook. But I do want to say more, here, about Geoffrey O’Brien’s essay, about “The Searchers,” and about the herd mentality of today’s intellectual elite. Stay tuned. That post is upcoming, when I find time to write it.

Friday, July 12, 2013

Esteemed literary personage Geoffrey O’Brien of the Library of America demonstrates what’s wrong with today’s literary scene. He writes not for the public, but a handful of the pretentious. Here’s an example from an essay in yesterday’s New York Review of Books:

“It is all about information being passed along and shared, but by whom, with whom, and toward what end? In laying out the elements of these stories—paying particular and sensitive attention to the personalities, so far as they can be surmised, of the individuals caught up in them—Frankel asserts no resolution beyond a nagging sense of the “relentless ambiguity” embodied by Ford’s movie. An unhealed historical wound finds expression in a film whose extraordinary beauty cannot assuage the contradictory and painful emotions that resonate at its core.”

Say what? As an old friend of mine used to say, “Spit that shit out of your mouth and speak clearly.”

Thursday, July 11, 2013

WHAT SHERMAN ALEXIE MIGHT SAY IF HE WERE TO SAY ANYTHING ABOUT THE DISASTROUS FAILURE OF A LONE RANGER MOVIE

If famed Native American award-winning author Sherman Alexie were to say anything, he’d talk about Johnny Depp, and the wonderful thing Johnny has done, taking upon himself the collective guilt of the white race—over its treatment of Native Americans—by generously starring as Tonto in the new Lone Ranger movie.

Hollywood used to divide the world, or at least the West, between Good and Bad Indians. He, Johnny Depp, Executive Producer of the new Lone Ranger movie, has flipped the script, dividing the world, or at least the West, between Good and Bad whites. Most, needless to say, are Bad—from cretinous backwoods-crazy Cavendish and his gang, to genocidal “civilized” folks expanding non-environmentally approved railroad development West. Johnny Depp is showing this, on a big screen, for the benefit of all, while proclaiming to the world from his Cross of Guilt that he Johnny Depp is a Good white man. Maybe the only one.

Does everyone see what Johnny has done?

He’s made Tonto—Tonto!—the star, and relegated the kemo sabe Lone Ranger to sidekick. Or afterthought. To make things more humorous, the Lone Ranger is played by Armie Hammer, scion to billions.

We have enlightened white man Depp, in white face—reverse Al Jolson; get it?—with a bird on his head, showing less enlightened even more privileged Armie how to be as enlightened as he, Johnny Depp, is enlightened.

If you thought the movie was about the West, or the Lone Ranger, or even Native Americans, you'd be wrong. It’s about the guilt of the civilization which built the railroads and not incidentally created the movie studios and their obscene profits (or, in this case, losses). More than this, it’s about Johnny Depp. It’s about the position of being a hyper-successful Hollywood actor when you know down deep you don’t deserve it. The only way to mock that success which you hate but you need and want is to incessantly mock it and the entire studio-CGI-fake Hollywood system behind it, and the media, and yourself, by playing a clown.

It’s about collective guilt and it’s also about Hollywood narcissism backed by non-Native American western-technology technocrats and hundreds of millions of bucks. Er, the green kind.

Depp is repeating the same crime he opposes. He doesn’t know it, yet very much knows it at the same time. He’s making the precious privileged white person—himself—and his progressively-sensitive feelings the center of the narrative. Generous stand-in for the genuine article, which presumably couldn’t be found. You see, it’s the only way it could work, even if it turns out it didn’t work. We know it’s not Tonto beneath the make-up. It’s Johnny Depp!

“Johnny Depp Died for Your Sins.” It’s not about Native Americans. Not at all about Native Americans. It’s about Johnny Depp expiating his own feelings of guilt with his overdone get-up and his play-acting posturing he’s crucifying himself before Hollywood cameras—and making millions of white man dollars in the process.

--and soon will be also at B & N’s Nook Books. I promise some strong writing is contained within, along with a host of ideas not just about Westerns, but about our culture. About us. From the most fearless critic around. Buy it now.

(Among other topics, I discuss the greatest Westerns. There could only be one #1 on the list—for which I give reasons. Read the book to find out. Thanks.)

Thursday, July 04, 2013

Here’s a YouTube video which includes the most famous scene in John Ford’s classic Western, “My Darling Clementine.” No, it’s not a gunfight.

Note the patience Ford has in developing the scene, to derive maximum impact when the “action” begins. Marvelous pacing. Note also the humanity of Henry Fonda’s portrayal of Wyatt Earp. John Ford presented characters, not caricatures. A far cry from what we’re subjected to in today’s movies.

(My new ebook, on the Western film genre, should be out this weekend. It discusses scores of Westerns, some as good as this one and others not.)

Wednesday, July 03, 2013

For the Fourth of July, the text of the Fourth Amendment, which is apparently being violated by the mass surveillance program of the National Security Agency:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”[